Meet the Rhinoceros Iguana, a reptilian Romeo who courts his scaly lady just two weeks a year right before rainy season sound familiar, guys? He chivalrously waits for her to crawl from her burrow so he can bob his head for several days to impress her so she will consent to make cold-blooded whoopie with him.

While usually found only on Hispaniola in the Caribbean, this yard-long armored lover with a vestigal horn is spending a few months with 60 of his reptilian cousins in a fun, informative exhibit at the Museum of Science.

Visitors can see venomous Gila monsters, Cuban knight anoles that change from brown to green to frighten enemies and green basilisks that "sprint" on their hind legs across water when startled.

For those adventurous enough for a little interactive role playing, you can switch places with a snake, chase down a terrified little mouse, open your jaws WIDE and munch him for lunch. Mmmmmm good!

This traveling exhibit, "Lizards & Snakes: Alive!" brings 26 species from five continents to remind us how evolutionary adaptations can be stunningly beautiful in their own Darwinian way.

Organized by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, in collaboration with the Fernbank Museum of Natural History, Atlanta, and the San Diego Natural History Museum, the show runs through April 27. All the reptiles are from Clyde Peeling's Reptileland in Allenwood, Pa.

John Ham, a reptile keeper from Reptileland who has traveled to Boston with the show, hopes to share his longtime fascination with reptiles with visitors.

As a kid growing up in Florida, he kept 32 different kinds of reptiles in his house and now dates a young female reptile aficionado. He is a walking fount of information about everything reptilian, including their diets, courting rituals, mating habits, hunting techniques and even what they taste like "chicken" in countries where they are regarded as culinary delicacies.

Ham can explain the varied functions of the different aspects of iguana anatomy with the exactitude of a Patriots season ticket holder discussing Tom Brady's passing statistics. He observed the small transparent scale atop an iguana's head, which is called the parietal or "third eye," allows it to detect changes in temperature and light and dark that might signal aerial predators.

Not long after the exhibit opened, Ham opened several of the reptiles' glass enclosures to feed them half a dozen crickets. Dozing on a branch, an Australian frilled lizard perked up, quickly snapped up the crickets one at a time and placidly ate them.

Ham suggests visitors who don't know much about reptiles just meander through the show, reading the notes outside of each enclosure, absorbing a bit about each creature's habits, feeding schedule and natural habitat.

Perhaps the single most impressive reptile on display is a magisterial 14-foot-long Burmese python. Its gorgeous geometrically patterned skin serves as camouflage, yet makes pythons a target for human predators who make clothing and accessories from them.

With a coiled muscular torso, the python is so strong, said Ham, it could crush and kill by constriction a small deer or even a human child.

Bunny Watson, the museum's live animal curator, hopes the exhibit will redress a "long list of misunderstandings" the public has about reptiles.

"People think they're all slimy or they're all venomous," she said. "We hope to correct those misconceptions. When people see them in person in a controlled environment, they're not so scary."

Originating 250 million years ago, reptiles, she said, are the oldest animals on Earth.

At its best, this show resembles a field trip from the Painted Desert to Galapagos, from the Amazon rainforest to Madagascar. Along the way visitors can get up close and very personal with several of nature's strangest, best designed critters, always with a pane of glass separating them.

Lew Stevens, the museum's senior curator, defined reptiles as vertebrates whose skin is covered by "scales and body plates" rather than feathers or fur.

"They are very elusive animals. Unless you're looking for them, you're not likely to see them," he said. "We hope this exhibit conveys the diversity of the lizards and snakes in our world."

Occupying all the continents except Antarctica, reptiles are classified into four fundamental orders:

Crocodiles and alligators (23 species)

Tortoises and turtles (300 species)

Squamata lizards, snakes and legless "worm-lizards" (7,900 species)

The rare Sphenodontia: only 2 species of Tuatara from New Zealand

To its credit, this show lets visitors recover the fascination many little boys have for slithery critters and bug-eyed reptiles that look like miniature dinosaurs. There are 20 interactive stations that let you get safely close to them.

Ham said the show features at least five varieties of geckos that don't sell insurance, including the Madagascan giant day gecko, common leaf-tailed gecko, lined leaf-tailed gecko, Henkel's leaf-tailed gecko and crested gecko, a rare fruit-eating reptile that was thought to be extinct until rediscovered in 1994 on the South Pacific island of New Caledonia.

Visit the Squamate Studio to listen to the recorded sounds of squamates, better known as lizards or snakes. Study a python and learn how they consume prey larger than their own heads. Assemble a "Bone Puzzle" to "build" your own snake or lizard from sculpted heads, feeding systems and rattles.

Test your reptile IQ by answering questions like these: Why does a skink have such a strange looking tail? How does a milk snake's bright colors help it? Why do a python's teeth point backward?

Don't expect answers from me.

Leave your misconceptions home and bring the kids. Come to the exhibit and discover serpents and crawling critters are a lot cooler than that nasty serpent that started all that trouble back in Eden.

THE ESSENTIALS:

The Museum of Science is located at Science Park, Boston.

Admission to "Lizards & Snakes: Alive!" is included with regular Exhibit Halls admission: $17 for adults; $15 for seniors (60+); and $14 for children (3-11).